The description actually just suggests the various enemies types will do more damage and/or have more heath:

Single Player: MASTER - A New Difficulty Setting

For those that have already completed the game on Adventurer, Survivor or Warrior settings and are looking for the next bill challenge, the all-new MASTER difficulty setting will be added in an upcoming patch of the game. Seasoned veterans will find themselves challenged by more aggressive wildlife, tougher pirates, and more deadly privateers. Your skills as a master of the Rook Islands will be tested.

Mouse scroll doesn't really replace the ability to instantly switch to the desired weapon, nor does the 360 dpad reliably for more than 4 weapons, and opening a menu breaks immersion. That discourages making games were you can swap between more than a few weapons at a time, let alone having a bunch of skills, items, abilities, and menus instantly available across dozens of keys.

Ratty wrote on Feb 9, 2013, 16:09:Really loved the first one done by Raven.

Raven only did the most recent Wolf game. The previous one was made my Gray Matter, who previously made Kingpin, Quake II: The Reckoning, and the Redneck Rampage and Cyberia games under the name Xatrix, and later merged with Treyarch.

I wasn't suggesting anyone will retexture the base game. That would be an absurdly large project, and significantly improving the texture quality would require more like a 40-80 GB download. However, some people are bound to make custom maps for the game simply because it's the only one that offers moders the opportunity to work free from the confines of traditional texturing, and while say 4-8 GB is huge for a single map, it's not terribly hard to get a file of such size hosted these days.

Redmask wrote on Feb 9, 2013, 15:12:We know, you're playing catch up with the thread here

No, that's not the issue, I've been reading the thread as it's been going.

Fion wrote on Feb 9, 2013, 15:13:The texturing technique relies even more heavily on available memory than traditional texturing, and with consoles that resource is thin at best.

Nah, actually with virtual texturing avalable memory only limits how well the can textures look in the distance, as can be seen in the screenshots here. Making the textures looks notably better up close simply requires more significantly more disk space, and the game is already pushing reasonable limits on that as is. That said, with the toolkit released I'm sure some people will make maps with amazing up close texture detail, but even on a small map such texturing will require multiple gigs of data.

Redmask wrote on Feb 9, 2013, 14:23:I don't really care, if it was promised or otherwise I think the game could have certainly used it.

The thing is, the game can't rightly use a high res texture pack like has been done for other games, because Rage doesn't use the traditional texturing methods those games do. So it's rather absurd to get upset about what was never reasonably possible, let alone ever actually promised.

Redmask wrote on Feb 9, 2013, 00:49:He didn't say the words I promise but its in reference to a prerelease interview where they were getting close to release and Carmack mentioned that the PC version would be getting better textures after release.

Dev wrote on Feb 8, 2013, 21:13:I just googled for info on that promised high res texture pack...

Did you actually find any such promise? I recall people misinterpreting a comment from Carmack to suggest as much shortly after the game came out, but I'm pretty sure no one at id ever actually promised a high res texture pack.

And since you do actually need quite a beefy rig to be able to run the game well with this texture pack, if you include it from the start, the people with lesser rigs will get shitty performance.

No, people with lesser rigs just have to use a lower texture quality setting so lower resolution mipmaps are used, like has been done in PC games for well over a decade now. Also, they obviously had the textures in the HD pack before the game released, as the textures in the base game are just downsampled versions of the ones in the HD texture pack.

ItBurn wrote on Feb 1, 2013, 16:49:You are wrong. This is at max details.

No, max details would have detail textures option from the 1.2 patch enabled, the effects of which can be seen in these mouseover examples. Granted, I don't really care for the effect myself, but that is max details. Also, as long as you have a clean running computer and keep the settings in line with your hardware's capabilities, you won't get any notable pop-in.

That said, while the skies in Rage are very pretty in screenshots they are utterly lifeless static skyboxes, while that REDengine3 shot is is almost surely using a fully dynamic sky as that's what CD Project has always done.